Identity Resolution Daily

This post is based on a March 31 interview with Infoglide Senior Vice President Douglas Wood by Linda L. Briggs for TDWI (The Data Warehousing Institute), March 31, 2009. Click here to read the entire interview.

In a comprehensive discussion, Doug Wood of Infoglide Software spoke about an area of confusion that exists when people discuss identity resolution. He pointed out that the term is sometimes misapplied to describe software that performs data matching alone.

[An identity resolution engine is] software that allows organizations to connect disparate data sources in order to understand possible entity matches and non-obvious relationships. It boils down to this: Providing capabilities for organizations to understand “who’s who” and “who knows whom” across multiple data silos. Occasionally, when we introduce the concept of identity resolution technology to a new customer, their immediate response is “I see, but we already have a data matching engine.” The truth is, identity resolution engines have data matching at the core, but [they] provide much more functionality and flexibility than that.

So if identity resolution incorporates data matching, what really differentiates it from data matching products?

Perhaps the key element of an identity resolution engine is the ability to take the entity match and relationship results, then apply domain-specific rules to them. How does the enterprise treat Customer A by virtue of the fact that he or she has some non-obvious relationship with Customer B? The answer to that question is specific to the domain.

Most of us are familiar with the use of data matching for removing duplicates from databases and in cleansing input for data warehouses and master data management, but identity resolution is used in unique ways.

With identity resolution technology, data isn’t subjected to deterioration processes such as cleansing or record merging. Rather, the data can remain in its original state and in its original location.

What this means is that identity resolution is especially adept at uncovering risk, fraud, and conflicts of interest since the “forensic value of individual records is preserved for ongoing analysis.” While government is a key market for identity resolution engines, a growing number of commercial applications are emerging in financial services (e.g., PATRIOT Act compliance, detection of loan fraud and credit card fraud), retail (e.g., uncovering organized retail crime activities by comparing shoplifters with employees or frequent merchandise returners), workers compensation (e.g., finding employers that change attributes to avoid paying premiums), lottery corporations (e.g., compare winning ticket holders against lottery retail employees to discover potential fraud), and customer relationship management (e.g., keeping two similar records unmerged until birth date attribute uncovers a father/son relationship).

What prevents traditional data matching products from addressing these problems?

There are no problems with matching engines per se. They just aren’t identity resolution engines. Matching engines typically use one or two algorithms, perhaps mathematical in nature, that examine structured data looking for name matches. They provide an improvement over Soundex, but little more. What they do is say “Yes, this is a match” or “No, this is not a match.”

Common requirements for solving identity resolution problems include connecting to more diverse data types and formats, handling higher volumes, and delivering deeper insight into non-obvious relationships from existing uncleansed data sources.

If identity resolution engines have existed for years, what has caused the recent rush to employ them?

As part of the 9/11 Commission recommendations, the Department of Homeland Security began a robust search for identity resolution technology that could keep terrorists off airplanes by comparing passenger attributes against terrorist watch lists, no-fly lists, and other types of threat-related data. Through a few iterations, the selection and implementation process evolved into the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) Secure Flight Program, which ultimately thrust identity resolution technology into the limelight. Secure Flight is now widely recognized as the pre-eminent use case for identity resolution technology requirements today, and a number of companies are involved in delivering that solution.

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By the Infoglide Team

Background Now: AG Seeks Injunction Against Contractors Asset Protection Association, Inc. (ConAPA) and Eugene Magre

“‘This company falsely promised its clients that if they gave their employees empty titles and worthless shares of stock they could avoid tens of thousands of dollars in workers compensation premiums,’ Attorney General Brown said. ‘But you can’t simply call a security guard a vice president and avoid complying with the law through a sophisticated and fraudulent scheme.’”

DailyTech: New Bills Target Stolen Merchandise Sold Online

“Under the new legislation, the brick and mortar retailers would score a major coup in that they could order eBay.com, Overstock.com, and Amazon.com to remove numerous goods without any proof.  Under the proposed laws, failure by the online retailers to ‘expeditiously investigate’ and remove the items would result in criminal penalties.”

BeyeNetwork: Business Drivers and Master Data

“Is the actual business need for a single version of the data, or just multiple versions, each of which is of higher quality? Drill down into this a little bit and you may need additional information from your business customers. What constitutes a requirement for master data? A situation in which two business processes need to have a fully shared view of the same representation of a data item?”

Web of Data: Report on Data Discovery by Bloor Research

“…there are now a number of products on the market that can discover data relationships that do not fall within the category of either data profiling or data quality. As a result, it is time to consider the importance of data discovery, and its requirements, as a market in its own right.”

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[Post from Infoglide] The Human Element in Identity Resolution

We’ve written quite a few posts here on the subject of identity resolution’s application to a broad range of problems that include terrorism, insurance fraud, crime, lottery fraud, sexual predators, workers comp employer fraud, and retail returns fraud. What we haven’t discussed very much is the relationship between the technology and the human beings that employ it.

Boston Globe: Woman to be sentenced in asbestos case

“Deleon ‘cheated the system’ in two ways to enrich herself, according to the government’s case. Under her ownership, Environmental Compliance Training issued false asbestos removal training certificates and lied about it to the state. She also evaded payroll taxes and workers’ compensation insurance premiums by paying hundreds of employees of Methuen Abatement Staffing under the table. The company had a gross unreported payroll of $4.6 million from 2002 to 2006, according to a government document introduced at the trial.”

New Mexico Independent: Homeland security ‘fusion centers’ are working, but concerns abound

“The federal assessment of the nation’s fusion centers — which borrows heavily from earlier reports by such internal watchdogs as the Congressional Research Service (CRS) and General Accountability Office (GAO) — lists a few privacy, transparency and oversight concerns about the fusion centers.

Wall Street Journal: Tips for TSA to Make Flying Safer, Easier

“Some experts suggest that the TSA cut back on the air marshal program, which puts law-enforcement agents on some flights, and shift spending to more effective security measures. Experts also want to see major changes in the current Registered Traveler program to further speed up security procedures for frequent travelers and focus resources on travelers who haven’t undergone background checks. They also want to see more variation to today’s predictable screening so bad guys don’t know exactly how to circumvent security.”

Gartner: Can “single view” of master data be achieved without an MDM technology?

[Andrew White] “Certainly users have been trying to achieve ’single view’ for many years, before the phrase master data management was coined.  The problem of trying to maintain a semantically consistent definition of master data across the business has been a long standing desire for most firms.  It is because business (and to a great extend, IT also) has grown to be so complex, that since 2000 many firms have begun to look to specific tools to help.”

WorkersCompensation.com: Chenango Man Charged As Fraud In Fish Story

“Investigators from NYSIF’s Division of Confidential Investigations said Mr. Panus was receiving workers’ compensation payments for a work-related back injury that occurred in 1988. The investigation, conducted in cooperation with the New York State Insurance Department Frauds Bureau and the Office of the Workers’ Compensation Fraud Inspector General, found that Mr. Panus was allegedly self-employed as the owner of Ponderosa Fish Farm while receiving benefits totaling $66,100.”

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By Robert Barker, Infoglide Senior VP and Chief Marketing Officer

We’ve written quite a few posts here on the subject of identity resolution’s application to a broad range of problems that include terrorism, insurance fraud, crime, lottery fraud, sexual predators, workers comp employer fraud, and retail returns fraud. What we haven’t discussed very much is the relationship between the technology and the human beings that employ it.

We software marketers are sometimes tempted to make it sound as though our products solve problems automatically. The truth is that identity resolution software performs tasks that humans could do, but it does them at a level of speed and precision that significantly enhances the results accomplished through those tasks. In order for the software to achieve excellent results, however, human judgment is required both in implementing the software and in applying the results.

The specifics of a particular problem differ markedly, and every solution is different. A person of interest in airline passenger screening has very different characteristics from a person of interest in workers compensation fraud, for example. Solutions differ even within a single problem domain, e.g. Nordstrom and Walmart have very different philosophies for merchandise returns.

In simpler data quality applications, default configurations can address many problems, but in identity resolution, a little tuning by experts greatly increases the solution’s value.  A domain expert may not understand the technology, but they understand their problem, industry, application, and company. And because of their depth of understanding of their domain, they can tell great results from good results in a heartbeat.

For maximum benefit, human domain experts work with technology experts to tune the software during implementation to apply similar “judgment” as the experts themselves would use to resolve multiple identities, uncover hidden relationships, and minimize false positives and false negatives. Technology’s critical role is to automate the process of sifting through the data to find likely matches and non-obvious relationships and to prioritize the cases that require human intervention so that finite human resources can focus on the most important things first.

While it’s critical to have software that can produce results right “off the shelf,” it is the domain expertise coupled with the technology expertise that creates a solution that is perfectly matched to the needs of a particular industry, application, and company.

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By Robert Barker, Infoglide Senior Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer

On February 2nd, the Wall Street Journal ran an article about IBM’s application of its identity resolution technology in government organizations, noting they expect it to generate $1 billion in the next four years. Just 18 months ago, Gartner initially identified entity resolution and analysis (aka identity resolution) as a technology “on the rise” in its analysis of the business intelligence (BI) market.  A year later in July 2008, it had moved from the bottom to near the top of the curve.  Moving into 2009, identity resolution is emerging as an independent horizontal market with multiple vertical applications, despite a challenging economy.

As with any emerging horizontal technology, the requirements for identity resolution solutions derive from needs articulated by early adopter organizations in a variety of vertical markets. Using identity resolution technology, these early adopters are developing and implementing vertical solutions for many fraud applications, including identifying employers who deceive workers compensation agencies, catching retailers who swindle winning lottery tickets, and detecting retail returns fraud and organized retail crime. Of course, the mother of all identity resolution projects is assessing terrorist risk of airline passengers before they board. On the surface these applications may seem unrelated, but they are driven by two significant common concerns – understanding more clearly who they are dealing with and discovering hidden, non-obvious relationships.

Until recently the identity resolution space was often overlooked, sometimes addressed by custom in-house applications, or inadequately served by cobbling together from products in adjacent and overlapping markets, such as data quality (DQ), master data management (MDM), customer relationship management (CRM), and business intelligence (BI), with existing systems and data sources.

As vendors from these adjacent markets tried to address the needs with existing products, customers found that they lack the combination of integrated capabilities needed to adequately build identity resolution solutions. Here’s a chart that highlights the strengths and weaknesses of each adjacent market’s approach to identity resolution.

From all indications, we expect continued acceleration of interest in solutions based on identity resolution technologies during 2009. We’d like to hear your thoughts.

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By the Infoglide Team

Benefit Fraud: Where are the deterrent sentences for benefit fraud?

“A repeat offender pedophile is on incapacity benefit [workers comp]. Why, one wonders. He seems to be well enough to assault 13 year old girls but not well enough to work.”

ebiz: While Business Intelligence Needs to Move from Passive to Active

“So, the difference is that you’re looking at information that tells you where you made mistakes, and perhaps how to avoid them in the future. Or, that you’re looking at information that tells you you’re about to make a mistake, perhaps in the context of historical information, and takes corrective action immediately without human intervention. Which seems more productive to you?”

Portland Press Herald: Hit-and-run thieves strike Maine stores

“Loss-prevention specialists say eBay, Craig’s List and other online auction and free advertising sites have fueled the increase in retail crime because they provide a new and anonymous way for shoplifters to resell stolen goods. ‘The best thing to happen to shoplifting is the Internet,’ said Strong.”

North Country Gazette: Self-Employed Plumber Nabbed For Scam

“While receiving benefits, Hogdin attested in signed statements that he had not returned to any form of work.  An investigation carried out by the New York State Insurance Fund’s Division of Confidential Investigations revealed that Hogdin, in fact, was self-employed repairing small engine machinery.”

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[Post from Infoglide] Does Data Matching Qualify as Identity Resolution?

“Any true identity resolution engine must not consist simply of a mathematical matching equation, nor must it rely upon data-deterioration processes such as ETL and data warehousing. Math cannot tell a user that Ian is an acceptable nickname for John, nor can simple mathematical equations point to similarities between the colors grey and charcoal.”

Fiscal Policy Institute: Building Up New York, Tearing Down Job Quality

“As buildings go up in New York City, more and more construction work has gone underground, signifying violation of several employment and tax laws. An estimated 50,000 New York City construction workers—nearly one in four—are either misclassified as independent contractors or employed by construction contractors completely off the books.”

SearchDataManagement: Enterprise-wide customer data quality still elusive at most organizations

“So why do so few organizations use data quality tools for customer data enterprise-wide? The reason, according to some, is that most companies collect and store customer data in numerous data sources spread throughout the organization with no way to connect them. Put another way, lacking a single view of the customer through a master data management (MDM) system or customer data integration (CDI) initiative, organizations lack any realistic way of applying data quality tools enterprise-wide.”

WorkersCompensation.com: Rome Man Accused Of Double Dipping

“A 58-year-old Rome man discovered working after he claimed a job-related injury prevented him from doing so was arrested Thursday on charges that he fraudulently collected $17,940 in workers’ compensation benefits.”

Multichannel Merchant: Retail Crime Up Thanks to Down Economy

“According to the National Retail Federation’s 2008 Returns Fraud Survey, released in November, retailers will see a total of about $219 billion in returns from sales made in 2008 – a 19% increase over the $178 billion in returns recorded in 2007. Of those returns, about $11.8 billion will be fraudulent – an increase of about 8% over last year’s figure of $10.9 billion.”

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By the Infoglide Team

Illinois Business Journal: Closing fraud loopholes would decrease Illinois’ workers’ comp costs

“Workers’ compensation costs for Illinois employers are higher than any of its bordering states, according to Jay Shattuck, executive director of the Illinois Chamber Employment Law Council. Illinois’ average total cost per claim, he says, is $21,335 - compared to Indiana’s $10,517, Wisconsin’s $11,342, Iowa’s $14,292 and Missouri’s $17,309.”

Hub Solution Designs: MDM: Buzz-Worthy But Not A Back-Breaker

“The software vendors who’ve flocked to MDM and put the MDM label on everything under the sun have certainly confused the market. Even so, the MDM software market grew 24% from 2007 to 2008.  In spite of the tough economic times we’re currently in, that rapid growth rate should continue for the next several years.”

Hi-Tech-Blog: Economy down = Employee theft up

“Brian J. Mich, head of anticorruption compliance and investigations at BDO Consulting, says during tough financial times, ‘people have a tendency to give in to temptation to commit criminal behavior,’ and that employers tend to become more vigilant. Mich also observes that people viewed as the most trustworthy–those who have ‘access to systems and information’–often commit the biggest thefts.”

Crain’s New York Business: Shoplifting increases at retail stores

“According to the nationwide study, 84% of retailers, including department stores, specialty apparel companies, electronic stores and drugstores, have seen an increase in theft and amateur shoplifting over the last three months. More than 75% of stores report a rise in financial fraud, and 80% cite intensified organized retail crime.”

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By the Infoglide Team

Supply & Demand Chain Executive: Avoiding the Big Bang Backlash of MDM Implementations

“A strong MDM strategy touches so many parts of the enterprise that it may take years to define, evangelize and implement, but that doesn’t mean that MDM needs to sit quietly on the sidelines until that time. Rather, an evolutionary approach to moving forward with MDM could in fact unlock the door to broader acceptance of an enterprise-wide MDM strategy.”

Government Computer News: Better privacy for better security

“Although the two complement each other, it is not easy to provide both security and privacy because using data for security can expose it. This means that the two concerns have to be balanced. To pursue one end at the expense of the other is self-defeating, the experts said.”

Poughkeepsie Journal: Saugerties man charged with fraud

“A Saugerties man faces insurance fraud and other charges after he allegedly accepted more than $77,800 in workers’ compensation benefits despite appearing well. Joseph A. Gambino, 58, Simmons Street, was arrested Wednesday after investigators produced videotapes showing him moving furniture and riding a motorcycle. During medical exams, he had been leaning heavily on a cane, according to the Ulster County District Attorney’s Office.”

FRAUDWAR: How to Legally Buy Hot Merchandise

“The Internet has opened new avenues for criminals to fence stolen merchandise. This has made it easier to sell stolen merchandise and there are many who believe that it contributes to the problem. The most recent survey by the National Retail Federation estimates that Organized Retail Crime is a $30 billion a year issue. Their most most recent Organized Crime Survey showed that e-fencing on traditional auction sites has grown by six percent. In response to this, they are even pushing bills in Congress to force the auction sites to allow more access to law enforcement and retailers, who are attempting to shut down this activity.”

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By the Infoglide Team

[Post from Infoglide] Identity Resolution Daily: If Only Data Quality Were That Simple

“The most effective approach blends several best-of-class techniques, and it scales without compromising performance. A multifaceted solution combines an extensive rules base for nicknames and abbreviations, heuristics, semantics, and a large array of public and proprietary algorithms and other types of analytics.”

MarketWatch: Fraudulent Doctor Surrenders License, Repays $144K to Texas Mutual

“Between January 2003 and March 2006, Shanti and his clinic over-billed workers’ compensation carriers for pain management services in excess of hours actually attended by patients, according to the indictments.”

IT-Director: The problem with data quality solutions part 4

“A typical case might be where one application required a five digit numeric field and another application requires the same five numbers plus an additional two alphabetic characters. So, here’s a question for data quality vendors: can your software tell the difference?”

SecurityInfoWatch: Police, private security given access to ORCIN database

“‘Right now information sharing between loss prevention security and police officers is very limited to who you know,’ said ORCIN Founder Rudy Bravo ‘This way, if you go onto the Web site and post information (about a retail crime) and send it, it will be sent out to all our members.’”

KARE11.com: Retailers report rise in ‘organized’ shoplifting

“What isn’t clear is whether the apparent rise in organized shoplifting is due mostly to the Internet, where auction sites offer sellers an easy way to make money on never-before-used products, or if the shoplifting is rising as the economy gets worse.”

TravelAgentCentral: ASTA Alerts Agents to 2009 Secure Flight Changes

“ASTA said it is essential that travel agents take steps now to prepare for this new set of procedures and offered specific guidelines agents can use to comply with the new data collection rules.”

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